Saturday, June 30, 2012

While transportation infrastructure has long elicited a
highly politicized debate in the US, particularly in regards to government
funding of alternative methods (Amtrak and rail, supporting the persistently
ailing airline industry), only in recent years have the discussions migrated
more heavily toward inadequacies in road and highway infrastructure.The collapse of the Interstate 35W
bridge in Minneapolis in August of 2007 helped stimulate the Federal Highway
Administration to probe into the quality, level of maintenance and fundamental
stability of some of the nation’s most heavily traveled bridges, while it
prompted the Minnesota Department of Transportation to increase the state fuel
tax mildly to fund bridge maintenance appropriately.

Five years later, the debate on the adequacy of
transportation infrastructure funding persists: the most comprehensive current
authorization of funds is the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient
Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, better known by its acronym
SAFETEA-LU. First signed by
President Bush in 2005, it expired in September 2009, but Congress has extended
it more than a half-dozen times since then. The latest (ninth) extension expired today (June 30, or
yesterday, depending on when this blog makes it to post), and while Congresshad long aimed to pass a final reauthorization bill,
it seemed more likely, in this heavily fractious political climate, that it would
simply settle for one or two more extensions until the November elections. However, to many people’s surprise, President Obama was able to sign into law a billthat at least
for the next week (until July 6) assured that no interruption to federal
highway funding would take place.It now appears most likely that a new bill will emerge in the next week,
rather than yet another short-term extension.For most Americans, none of this is particularly earth
shattering news: only institutions with strong ties to lobbying are likely to
follow the development of this bill on a day-to-day basis.My suspicion, in fact, is that over 90%
of Americans would not know what SAFETEA-LU is.Does this seem strange, given our overwhelming dependence on
the interstate highway system for traversing this mammoth country?

It may be premature for me to accuse Americans of prevailing
complacency in this matter, but obviously there is a far greater confidence
that the legislature always will do something about this, and the impact of
that decision is not going to cause widespread polarization among the
constituents. Compare the passage
of this bill to the results of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable
Care Act: everyone has been glued to their TVs! The “complacent” label may seem snide, but it was certainly
a word Minnesotans heard a fair amount in the summer of 2007, and it wasn’t
targeted at residents of that state: negligence and indifference toward
infrastructural needs was a nationwide problem back then, and it remains so
today. After MnDOT devised
alternative transportation routes during the reasonably fast paced (13 month)
reconstruction of the I-35W bridge, did we resume our blithe disregard? Was the loss of 13 lives during that
collapse simply not significant enough to confront the problem the same way we
have confronted the funding of health care?

Looking across the recent improvements in our highway
system, it’s hard to conclude that improvements in the Federal Interstate
Highway System operate under a consistent authority—most likely because they
don’t. I-65 as it runs through
Kentucky offers an excellent example.

As the image above indicates, this stretch of the 887-mile
highway weaves between Kentucky’s undulating hills and limestone beds. Just a few miles later further south,
the landscape is virtually unchanged.

Perhaps a little flatter, but not much different than
before. This is how most of
I-65 in Kentucky looks: with few exceptions, the interstate passes through overwhelmingly
rural countryside. Kentucky in
general is not a terribly urban state: only one metro, Louisville/Jefferson
County, ranks in the nation’s Top 50 for size, and only four cities (Louisville, Lexington,
Bowling Green, Owensboro) claim populations over 50,000. The state ranks 22ndinpopulation density,
but at 110 persons per square mile, it is less than a tenth as densely
populated as some of the crowded northeastern states such as New Jersey and
Rhode Island. While traffic
volumes for I-65 through Louisville are undoubtedly high at peak hours, the
only two other communities of reasonable size (populations over 15,000) with
exits along the I-65 stretch of Kentucky are Elizabethtown and Bowling
Green. These are the only communities
outside of metro Louisville along the interstate that offer a choice of
services (gas, food, lodging) beyond the bare minimum—quite a few of the
already sporadic exits along I-65 offer nothing at all.

In short, Kentucky is not a particularly crowded state. But most of its share of I-65 would
suggest otherwise. Through much of
the Midwest and South, six lanes is reserved for more urbanized areas. The only portions of I-65 in Indiana (a
state with nearly double Kentucky’s population density) that are more than four
lanes are the Indianapolis metro, NE Indiana around Gary and Merrillville, and
the Louisville suburbs in southern Indiana. Ohio, the tenth most densely populated state in the country,
also claims huge stretches of rural interstate highways that are only four
lanes wide. But in recent years,
Kentucky’s DOT has overseen the widening of nearly all of I-65, with the exception
of a 43-mile segment south of Elizabethtown and north of Bowling Green, and the
Governor articulates proposals for an upgrade there during the FY 2012 – FY
2018 Highway Plan. Before long, all of I-65 in Kentucky
will be at least six lanes wide.

Another noticeable feature is the superior lighting of I-65
in Kentucky across its exits.

Streetlights are numerous at the exit ramps, even if the
intersecting street does not host a great deal of services or traffic. In Indiana and Ohio, only the busiest
of rural intersections get streetlights, and their number often depends on the
traffic volumes: those with a variety of hotels and restaurants may have a
dozen streetlights, those with only one or two gas stations may have a half
dozen or less, and those that are the most rural will have none. Conversely, in Kentucky, virtually every
interchange on I-65 is now fully saturated with lights—urban or rural, and most
are still resolutely rural.

When passing near Bowling Green, where the exits are often
quite a bit busier, the streetlights are even more numerous.

Bowling Green is a moderately sized city of approximately 58,000
inhabitants. Cities of such a size
in either Ohio or Indiana are numerous, but in Kentucky, Bowling Green is the
third largest city. And between
its three primary exits off of I-65, the segments of interstate remain
consistently well-lit:

This stretch of highway deploys of stanchions in the median
of the interstate, planted firmly in the Jersey barriers at short intervals. Usually only larger metros of over
250,000 would integrate such a lighting technique, and exclusively when the
interstate passes directly through the most urbanized area. I-65 circumscribes the exurbs of
Bowling Green, yet motorists still get some big-city lighting. Indiana’s comparably sized
cities—Anderson, Lafayette, Terre Haute, Muncie—only get lighting at the major
exits. Granted, the respective
interstate does not pass directly through the hearts of those cities either,
but the lighting is nowhere near as sophisticated. Ohio shares the same condition as Indiana, with many lightly
traveled interchanges remaining completely unlit. Thus, Kentucky, despite being a significantly less densely
populated state, has invested in highway infrastructure at a level that far
surpasses that of its more urbanized neighbors to the north. I have no doubt that I-65 through Kentucky
receives a number of travelers passing through on this very important corridor
that connects Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. But the fact remains that Indiana and Ohio also can claim
significant trucking traffic in addition to their much larger population
bases. Both Indiana and Ohio,
because of their proximity to other large cities inside and outside of the two
states, have accommodated a significant ground logistical industry, suggesting
that, in aggregate, their interstate highway segments will remain much busier
than Kentucky’s for the foreseeable future, however well-used it may be.

This comparative observation by no means intends to
criticize the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s transportation spending decisions, nor
those of Indiana and Ohio. It
simply demonstrates the visible differences in states’ priorities. Kentucky’s Highway Plan includes the proposal for spending Road Fund revenues appropriated in each new two-year
period, which includes state and federal gasoline tax revenues.This has proven a highly volatile
source during the serious recession, due to reduced fuel consumption and
purchase of vehicles.The Federal
Highway Trust Fund has been particularly unstable, not only because of reduced consumer spending
but because Congress has not agreed on a suitable alternative to SAFETEA-LU
since it expired; the series of resolution/extensions disburse about 20% fewer
funds than before the act’s 2009 expiration.

Even if many fundamentals of a limited access highway
(design, safety parameters) remain more or less the same from state to state,
the “embellishments” will inevitably vary tremendously. At least for now, Kentucky has some of
the most luxurious interstates in terms of lane widths and lighting,
particularly in relation to the fact that so much of the state is sparsely
populated. By contrast, signage is
less developed in Kentucky than in other states: few—perhaps none—of the
overpasses in Kentucky have any indicator of what the name of the road is,
whereas in Indiana, most overpasses do.
And in Alabama, virtually every street has a particularly handsome sign:

These signs are relatively recently funded—probably
simultaneous with the highway widening in Kentucky—and they closely approximate
the Clearview font approved by the FHWA to phase out the older, splotchier
Highway Gothic. Notice this
example here, with the new font on the overpass and the old one to the right of
the road:

Alabama has the slickest signs I have seen among my own
recent road trips. And at this
point, Kentucky interstate driving is about as comfy as you can get: roads as
wide as you expect to see in Connecticut, but with a fraction of the population
density. Meanwhile, Ohio and
the Mid Atlantic states have invested much more heavily in protective fencing
to prevent injury when motorists on the overpass might throw objects out the
car so that they could hit people below.
Ohio has these fences on almost all overpasses; Indiana, Alabama, and
Tennessee have them on just a few; Kentucky has none. Will we ever see a consistency among the states in all of
the various infrastructural amenities?
I’m not holding my breath, and while I hate to end on a cynical note, it
is clear that some states are devoting greater amounts of money to bridge
maintenance than others—time will only tell where, amidst a decentralized
transportation funding system, the next Minneapolis will take place.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

When navigating through an unfamiliar place, either urban or
rural, we tend to seek visual points of reference to aid us in further
wayfinding. It is as instinctual
of an action as folding the corner of a book. Across the countryside, visual cues assume a variety of
incarnations: a distinctive geological form, an unusual sign, an anachronism (particularly
old-fashioned or unexpectedly contemporary), or an anomalous color or
shape. Rural reference points are
frequently large, nearly always tall, but only occasionally are they part of an
intentional effort to “stand out” as an explicit reminder of a particular
location.

By contrast, urban reference points are nearly always
manmade and deliberate, sometimes bordering on the point of ostentation. In his famous 1960 book, TheImage
of the City, Kevin Lynch includes landmarks among his five fundamental
elements people deploy in order to assimilate visual information that helps them
navigate in an urban setting; the other four elements are edges, paths, nodes
and districts. Landmarks may be
the least subtle because they are particularly geographically contained—neither
linear nor planar and thus essentially uni-dimensional. Distinctive height and appearance
usually endow an edifice with an advantage as a landmark: it could be the
tallest feature in a city, or, in a metropolis with numerous skyscrapers, it
may simply be a monument of considerable size with a unique appearance.

In most Midwestern towns and smaller cities, the landmark
fits both of these characteristics: namely, the architect conspired to give a
certain structure both superior height or massing as well as a distinctive
look. It should come as no
surprise that these landmarks tend to be county courthouses: in Indiana, Ohio,
and just about anywhere else in the former Northwest Territories, the
courthouse occupies the town’s central square, surrounded by other commercial
buildings on most, if not all, four sides. (The only exceptions are when the county/community is too
small to justify enough commercial buildings to surround the square, or when
town leadership has demolished a preponderance of these aging structures.) The
clock tower, spire, or cupola typically ensure that the courthouse will be
taller than anything else in the community, augmenting the building’s visual
prominence and transforming the square into the town’s unquestionable
center—the “node” by Lynch’s definition.

Anyone with more than a passing familiarity of Indiana
landscapes can envision a county seat with its venerated central courthouse
square. For me, Crown Point,
Greensburg, and Noblesville are among the first that come to
mind. However, despite being
larger than any of the aforementioned cities, Muncie does not have a courthouse
square that embeds itself in the typical visitor’s memory. For the time being, this image from Google Streetview of the Delaware County Courthouse will have to suffice. If this structure fails to convey the conventional image of
a Midwestern county courthouse, that is quite obviously because it isn’t one. The 19th century building that housed most Delaware County government functions met the wrecking ball in 1966,
replaced shortly thereafter with this structure, now the Delaware County County Court administrative offices. Here are some recent photos I’ve taken at approximately the same southeast corner, showing that
landscape architects have spruced up the grounds since the above Flickr photo
was taken, reducing the imperviousness of the plaza by adding rainwater gardens
and a prominently located state/national flag.

By most estimates, it’s still not a very inspiring
structure. I’m hardly one to
denigrate all of the brutalist architectural influences that this contemporary
building evokes—after all, Muncie’s First Merchants Plaza is, in my opinion, a
respectable brutalist building--but it’s hard
to summon a great deal of love across the web for the new building: a simple Google Images search reveals far more links for the 19th
century building that formerly stood at this site. Quite simply, hardly anybody even cares enough about
this building to photograph it. And the actual courthouse, now called the Delaware County Justice Center and sitting a block north of this concrete structure (which is the actual original site for the historic courthouse), is hardly any better.

It, too, seems heavily fortified and uninviting, though at least it make some sense: this building also hosts the county's jail.

Aside from brutalism’s obvious precipitous fall from grace by
the mid 1980s, what else is wrong with the first of these two buildings, which stands at Muncie’s
implicit dead center? Even with
the flagpole or landscaping, it doesn’t convey the monumentality needed to make an
identifiable landmark: not only is the court admin building the same height or smaller than some of
the surrounding structures, the fenestration is fundamentally introverted and
uninviting to passers-by. The
massing of the upper floors obscures any first-floor entrance in the shadows,
so that the plaza is the only way to discern that this might be the building’s
façade. Not only does this
new court lack a prominent apex that could attract the eye from a distance, but
its intrinsic reticence nullifies any grandeur that could at least turn the
courthouse plaza into a central node.
Here’s a view from the western side of the building:

Nothing more than a blank wall. No lawn, no sculptures, no flags. Visitors could walk or drive right by the courthouse without
even noticing this building, and as a result, Muncie lacks the perceived core
to its downtown that we have come to expect in most Indiana county seats.

The next contender for a central landmark, Muncie City Hall, built in 2005, achieves a certain stature as it looms over the bridge to the
White River, directly to its northwest.But it only functions as a hub by proxy: it is the next best thing,
given the absence of the prominent central courthouse that visitors would
expect. Where does this leave a
city in search of a landmark? The
Shafer Bell Tower at Ball
State University certainly could function as a rallying point within the campus,
but this relatively new structure belongs to the university, both de jure and metaphorically.

It is virtually meaningless to the at least 60% of Muncie
residents who have no affiliation with the school.

Not surprisingly, the community itself has attempted to
place the crown on what it perceives to be the city’s presiding head, and two
of the strongest contenders are particularly ironic. The first, the Muncie Pole at the intersection of S. Tillotson
Avenue and W. Jackson Street, has its own Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and it received media attention from as far away as Texas--all of it due to an engineering mistake during street and sidewalk
improvements. The utility pole
actually sat in the right-of-way, with three reflective strips emblazoned along
the lower part of the stanchion to keep vehicles from colliding into it. Sure, Muncie has dozens of other poles
to hoist traffic lights, but when locals referenced “The Muncie Pole”, everyone
knew which one they were talking about: The Pole had earned its capital
letters. It was a landmark in
itself, at least to the locals, and, due to its distinctiveness in a landscape
that lacks prominent features, it may very well have stood out enough that
visitors unfamiliar with Muncie could use it as a spatial mnemonic device. The Muncie Pole gets the past tense
treatment though; within the last month, city engineers and the public works
department corrected their error and the pole was removed, leaving only a
conventional traffic light pole, shielded from traffic by a grade separation
and curb.

Another oddly situated traffic light in the city may already
qualify as a successor to the Muncie Pole, inheriting the name from its
predecessor as it becomes this city’s most effective landmark and reference
point.

Seeing a utility pole shellacked with postings is hardly
uncommon, but this one doesn’t include want-ads, solicitations, meeting
locations, missing pets or miracle weight loss strategies. It’s devoted almost exclusively to
decals reflective of the local “scene”, a region extending out to and including
Indianapolis. Local bands, festivals,
breweries and non-profits all feature heavily. Semantically, the content of this pole is a world apart from
what one might expect to see in such a location: these stickers don’t carry
precise, distinctive notifications intended to mobilize passers-by; instead,
they tout brands which, in aggregate, appropriate far more visual significance
than they would in isolation. The
pole is a repository for alternative culture—the touch-and-go pastiche approach
is critical to its appeal, even as it might alienate others who merely see this
as an act of vandalism. (Eliciting
a polarizing response is nearly always a good thing—fewer people are ambivalent,
and the display thus becomes more memorable.) While the earlier Muncie Pole earned its meme status through
a variety of exogenous referential material (Twitter and Facebook, inter alia), this pole is a meme because
of what it possesses and displays: that is, hands that have slapped the metal
with adhesives have enhanced its role as a cultural signifier.

But why is this specific pole a contender for the NEW Muncie
Pole when alternate poles abound? What
makes it so special? It helps that
it’s in a central location, near the heart of downtown Muncie. But why not another downtown stop light
pole? Yet again, this pole earns
its distinction through a probable error in calculating the point of
installation, which is manifested by stepping backward several

Usually a stanchion for a traffic light sits closer to the
corner of the block; not at the halfway point of a storefront’s primary
window. Pivoting a bit to
the right—

--it doesn’t remotely align with
the handicapped ramp that connotes the crosswalk location. It strangely hugs the building instead of
the curb. My estimate is the more
practical location would be directly to the left of the manhole cover that sits
closest to the building’s cornerstone.
But it clearly wasn’t meant to be.

The photo above suggests that the complementary pole on the
other side integrates much better with the streetscape: it sits on a bulb-out
in the sidewalk and enjoys a reasonable setback from the structure at this
corner. In fact, the photo below shows that this pole does not impinge upon
either a building view or a pedestrian right-of-way along the sidewalk.This pole--coincidentally in front of the bland, windowless court administration building--also lacks any of the
stickers; it’s just another pole in Muncie, but certainly not the Muncie Pole.

The pole in front of Savage’s Ale
House has already achieved enough salience in a small city like Muncie that it
functions as a minor downtown meme.
If Ball State University students decide that it is the ideal point of
reference downtown (“Let’s meet at the pole and decide where to go from
there”), then it has, in the context of Kevin Lynch’s urban semiotics,
essentially become a landmark—the substitute for the Delaware County Courthouse
demolished decades ago, and ironically standing directly across from the forgettable
modern courthouse of today, as the photos indicate. Here below, is a view looking northward, with the intersection featuring the New Muncie Pole in the background and the modern Delaware County Courthouse in the foreground to the right.

And here's a close-up on the building with the Muncie Pole. Although on the left in the above photo, in the photo below the three-story building is in the center. Urban landmarks tend to include at least a little bit
of architectural bombast; normally they are very deliberately the most
prominent visible element from the built environment. The architect intended nothing less than a centerpiece. The Muncie Poles (both the deceased one
on Facebook and its slightly more urban successor) owe their existence to what
is most likely an unconscious err in calculation, but that is enough to make
them an anomaly in a landscape riddled with sameness. And for Muncie, a previously mundane metal pole has the
potential to become the epicenter of pedestrianized student culture…at least
until one of those sites of former buildings that are now parking lots becomes
gets developed into bigger, better, more visually distinct landmark than a stop
light post. Economy notwithstanding,
a hip, stickered pole shouldn’t be tough to outdo.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Murals are a time-tested method of urban beautification that
generally eschew political controversy, thanks to a number of factors: the low
cost when compared to other capital improvement projects; the minimal
disruption of other routine urban patterns (traffic, utility operation)
involved in the “installation” of the mural; their persistent success at
attracting private or non-profit sponsorship to fund part or all of the artwork
(few murals depend exclusively on city taxes for funding); their apparent
ability to deter graffiti artists or other vandals; and, quite simply, the
unambiguous ability to replace a formerly boring or downright unsightly blank
wall with artistic content. While
of course the actual content of a mural could occasionally arouse objections as
easily as any other piece of civic art, I cannot recall any murals attracting
public outcry in recent years. Most
of them go up quietly. Conversely,
the disapproval of Fred Wilson’s “E Pluribus Unum” sculpture in Indianapolis
was enough to convince its original sponsors to discontinue it altogether. One can only speculate if Wilson’s installation, in
which a prominently featured emancipated slave elicited a variety of
remonstrations, suffered precisely because
it was a sculpture, whereas the Arts Council of Indianapolis oversaw 46 murals
across the city in conjunction with Super Bowl XLVI earlier this year—hardly an
outcry. Do people worry less about
murals because of the expectation that they won’t last forever? Any mural could meet a very sudden end
if a developer constructs a building in the adjacent lot, thereby concealing
the wall and the artwork.
Meanwhile, a particularly unpopular mural will not likely face much
opposition if another muralist receives a commission to paint over it.

The relationship between a mural and the space over which it
presides is critical in understanding how this genre of civic art has been able
to endure and proliferate over the years.
I have touched upon this topic in two previous blog articles: one
about a mural in Indianapolis that predates the big Super Bowl Initiative;
another surveying some murals in Philadelphia
(the nation’s leading mural city, with over 3,000) in particularly distressed
neighborhoods. In both cases, the
murals overwhelmingly rest on blank walls that front vacant lots. More likely than not, those vacant lots
formerly hosted a building that concealed the currently “muraled” wall, and
thus, a sizable painting helps divert attention away from the structure that is
now gone from demolition; it almost functions as a proxy. (Particularly in Philadelphia, murals
often suffer an association with the low-income neighborhoods in which they are
the most prevalent.) But is it a
suitable alternative? A
particularly beloved mural will mobilize a community to preserve it, both when
the paint begins to peel and when a developer purchases the abutting vacant
lot. But since the mural owes its
existence to a demolished building—otherwise there would be no “canvas”—is it
wise to hinder development solely for the sake of a mural? In previous blogs I have argued an
emphatic no; let the mural survive through photographs, but don’t sacrifice a
chance to restore housing in a neighborhood long neglected by investors. I have yet to witness a situation where
development faces hurdles due to the potential loss of an adjacent mural, but I
am confident that it will happen someday, if it hasn’t yet already. This tacit dilemma in mural site
selection makes this latest artistic incarnation in Philadelphia that much more
impressive. The photo below comes
from a rental car parking lot at the city’s international airport:

“How Philly Moves”, a celebration of dance, apparently is quite new, with a dedication of October 12, 2011. The site selection here is particularly
savvy: even if Hertz itself owns rental lot, everything in the photo ultimately
falls under a single supervisory force: the City of Philadelphia, and the city
would control any major developmental or infrastructural changes. If the parking garage and the adjacent
car rental lot don’t remain under these land uses in perpetuity, I have no
doubt they will at least survive for decades to come. Thus, chances of a new edifice concealing the mural are
unlikely. Quite frankly, “How
Philly Moves” does not owe its existence to a demolished structure nearby,
unlike so many others. A closer
view emphasizes the prudence behind both the site selection and the
beautification initiative:

Without the mural, it was a very run-of-the-mill parking
garage—the design of the garage had about as much architectural interest and
originality as an unintentionally exposed brick side wall. I have no doubt that the artist had to
take extra care to position the dancing figures across the gaps in the wall so
that it still visually communicated a desirable message. This mural looks tough, and it seems particularly accomplished as a result. While it would have been interesting if
the figures and the mural extended downward to the lower two ribbons of
concrete, the absence of paint there also helps emphasize the contrast.

I hope, in the future, cities like Philadelphia abide by
this model, seeking unorthodox painting surfaces if necessary, but recognizing
that strategic sites boost a mural’s staying power, perhaps to the level of a
stone sculpture. Elaborate
commitments such as this airport mural are unlikely to convey the sort of
bottom-up community collaboration that the aforementioned murals all
demonstrate—something like this parking garage is simply too elaborate, too
difficult to implement, and (I have no doubt) too expensive to reorganize en
masse. But its durability and
technical accomplishment may compensate for the slightly impersonal
approach. Then again, the content
may fall under much greater public scrutiny if the content seems dubious. After all, a mural like this is
permanent, right?

Saturday, June 2, 2012

When an instructor for a real estate and development class
told his students, “You can’t own a view,” he said it with the nonchalance that
suggested it should become a mantra.
What he was implying was that neither the developer nor the prospective
property owner should stake all of an investment on the quality of a view. No legal recourse exists to enjoin a
landowner from building in a fashion that inhibits or weakens another
individual’s perspective from the window or front door, regardless of how much
that waterfront, mountain range or skyline gratifies the eyes. Lines of sight are nebulous enough that
private ownership of them is difficult to protect or enforce: if everyone was
entitled to his or her view, nothing could ever get built. Any collective attempt to protect a
view loses its punch, because the magnificence or importance of the objects
beheld is highly subjective. Thus,
the retention of the prized object itself will usually earn more legal credence
than access to the “viewshed”, a contemporary buzzword appearing in Wikipedia (but not most dictionaries). While it is possible that Landowner A
could seek an injunction against Landowner B’s development permit under
environmental, historic preservation, or public health considerations, in most
circumstances, view deprivation does not evoke a judge’s sympathy.

Nonetheless, the private market continues to demonstrate how
greatly people value a fantastic view in aggregate, regardless of the
likelihood that something else in the future will impede it. Waterfront high-rise residential
buildings still command high prices, not only because of the proximity of the
building’s front door to the water, but also because of the terrific views at
the pricier higher levels. The
fenestration of many high-rise buildings exclusively orients itself toward the
side with the great views, since windows on the other side are not worth a
fraction. Conversely, the market
also tends to shun properties with particularly poor or unappealing views. The price that consumers attach toward
great views makes this fairly recent multifamily development in downtown
Indianapolis, known as the Maxwell, that much more of an oddity.

The developer Kosene & Kosene completed this structure a
few years ago, with the intention that it would function as condominiums, but
it entered the market at the bursting point of the real estate bubble, when
downtown condos sat empty and unsold.
Thus, the developers repositioned the building as luxury apartments, and
the smaller units (studios and one-bedrooms) sold quite briskly. The numerous chic Art Deco references
probably aligned with young professionals’ tastes, and the location just south
of the heart of the Lockerbie Square neighborhood was ideal. In short, the Maxwell could command
high prices as rentals. And, as
Indianapolis midrises go, it’s big, at 105 units occupying one quarter of a
city block: with the exception of an interior courtyard, it covers nearly the
entirety of its parcel, indicated through this side view:

The above photo also reveals that the designers devoted the
entire frontage along Ohio Street to retail and saved the back for slyly
concealed resident parking spaces.
Such a move placates urban advocates who have criticized other midrise
developments in Indy for neglecting retail altogether; the Regional CenterDesign Guidelines of Indianapolis also stress the need for first-floor retail in residential
developments. However, the
absorption of this retail space so far has been problematic. As this December 2011 photo below
indicates, most of it remains vacant, almost three years after completion:

Only the easternmost corner has a tenant—a total of about
25% of the Maxwell’s retail GLA.

To its credit, the Maxwell has successfully secured a highly
successful temporary tenant for that large space in the past: the Indy Winter
Farmers Market. But it has never
found a permanent occupant. Why is
the retail here so hard to lease, when it has a reasonably high-density
concentration of well-heeled residents right above it? Well, the building doesn’t sit at a
prominent intersection: the north-south street at the corner, Park Avenue, is
never more than a local road, with very low traffic volume. This building sits right at the
southern edge of a neighborhood, with an as-of-yet largely undeveloped ocean of
parking directly south of Market Street, which weakens its opportunities for
pedestrian activity. Very few
other buildings in this portion of Ohio Street support retail, so the Maxwell
is largely alone in that regard. But
the biggest Achilles heel is what sits directly across the street from this
upmarket residential building:

An electrical substation—not most people’s idea of the
Eiffel Tower, the Chrysler Building, Lake Tahoe, or even the Hollywood(land)
sign. Such goliaths are
commonplace in downtowns, since they provide a centralized source for the
“stepping down” of voltage from the original (coal) power plants to a more
suitable level that serves neighboring communities. My estimate is that the average buyer would think this is
ugly. Who would want to view this
from a front window? Accompanying
its ungainly appearance is the toxic perception—whether real or imagined—that
they are noisy or potentially dangerous.
Given these considerations, what prospective business owner would choose
this as a location for a restaurant or boutique when so many better
alternatives exist? While it’s
hard to tell from the photographs, the one tenant (Civil Engineering
Consultants, still there at the time of this blog post) has Venetian blinds
which it often keeps partially drawn.
Despite the positive buzz the Maxwell generated when it was completed, I
have my doubts that even during the best of economic times it would have worked
as a condominium, thanks in large part to that view. Renters are going to be less particular, but clearly an
owner will just see this as one facet of the overall investment, and not a
positive one.

Whether unconscious or not, it would seem that the folks at
Kosene & Kosene who built the Maxwell took the aforementioned maxim “you
can’t own a view” and inverted it to their advantage. The location, just outside of the edge of one of the city’s
elite urban neighborhoods, endowed it with an apparent strong potential to
market as luxury or at least high-end housing. But the appearance of the electrical substation across the
street deflated the assessed value of the property and no doubt helps to
explain why no other developer had stepped up to the plate in area that had
been experiencing a multifamily housing boom for years. Maybe the biggest element of risk
was the attempt to build condos here; like most urban condominium projects, the
developers have usually conceived of the viability of their structures as
apartments as well—part of a safeguard against a soft ownership market. And the Maxwell could continue to enjoy
viability as a high-end apartment complex for years to come. But my guess is that if it someone
hoped to make it into a condominium complex, he or she would have to do
something about that substation.

Three options come to mind. The first, though widely implemented in Europe, is
relatively rare in the US: to bury the substation. Anaheim (California) Public Utilities received a fair amount
of attention when it recently built a new substation under the 2.5-acre Roosevelt Park, with maintenance access points built inconspicuously into a
hillside. The inception of this
new substation was a response to steady population growth—a contrast from the already
existing one across the street from the Maxwell in Indianapolis. Burying a pre-existing substation would
amount to a huge expense for merely aesthetic goals, and since there is no
financial incentive for Indianapolis Power and Light Company (better known as
IPALCO, lesser known as a subsidiary of Virginia-based AES Corporation) to do
so, the most likely resolution would be funding through a city subsidy. Since a subsidy to improve aesthetics
of a small, obscure substation is likely to prove hugely politically unpopular,
this solution is probably already dead in the water.

The second of the three options would be to conceal it
through a sheath, as has been attempted many times, with mixed success. All too often, the resultant structure
is an imposing, windowless titan of brick or concrete, surrounded by a
chain-link fence—an marginal improvement over the exposed utility that is so
architecturally uninspiring that online searches offer few examples (this one in Chicago is an exception). But it doesn’t
have to be this way: European cities have long sheathed their substations
within chic façades, and, according to a 2008 New York Times article, Consolidated Edison found a way to hide
a recent South Bronx substation within a multi-story sheath with “windows”,
which proved so effective that passers-by asked when the condos would start
going up for sale. Cheaper than
burying an existing substation, building a sheath would seem to be the best
option if the owners of the Maxwell ever hope for a viable conversion of their
apartment building back to condominiums at some point in the future.

The third and final option is a flight of fancy, but I have
to mention it because it echoes an endeavor I proposed in this blog a few years ago, in order to mitigate the relentless prominence of utility
cables across older New Orleans neighborhoods. The following 2009 NewYork Times article references how electric substations “lack the perverse
elegance of utility poles or transmission towers”, in order to bolster an
argument for following Anaheim’s example by burying one under a city park. Perverse elegance was exactly what I
had in mind when I thought that New Orleanians should turn their tangle of
poles and electric wires into a pop culture meme, much the way they already had
with water meter manhole covers. And
trendy loft apartments have found beauty in exposed ventilation ducts for at
least a decade or two. Who’s to
say substations are objectively ugly?
Surely a gifted spin-artist could turn the spiny monster across from the
Maxwell into a suavely strummed chord from a twelve-string guitar, or an
irregularly metered stanza from an urban poem. Since it’s probably a bit dangerous to host a café, art
installation, or a miniature skate park within the chain link fence (or even
along the sidewalk adjacent to it), one can at least probe the substation’s
intrinsically curious qualities, like the one in the photos below:

What’s going on with those railroad tracks that terminate
abruptly at the chain link fence?
Do they serve a purpose, or did they have a function in the past? Could they have linked to an old
interurban line? If this parcel of
land offered even a trace of a sordid history, it could re-integrate itself to
the public consciousness in a chic fashion that just might even allow it to
transcend its perceived assault on the senses. Obviously this option is a stretch, but it would undoubtedly
prove cheaper than blotting it from the landscape, and it would earn a greater
integrity because of the creative verve that generated it. (Whether it would last a full decade as
“hipster infrastructure” is another concern altogether.)

The act of brainstorming these potential solutions for the
Maxwell Apartments in Indianapolis only serves to weaken the “you can’t own a
view” assertion—even if it’s true from a legal standpoint, the psychological
ownership of views are immutable.
Quite simply, people will think they own a right to this view if they
own property that forces them to look at it. They will manifest their sense of ownership in either
planning and development hearings, or simply through deflated prices and
reduced market demand. Only steady
persuasion of the reality of the real estate market stands any chance of
convincing them otherwise. In this
downtown Indianapolis neighborhood, a small parking lot that sits immediately
to the west of the Maxwell no doubt also suffers a reduced demand for
residential development because of the utility substation across the street. But perhaps, in the future, a potential
developer of this parking lot could team with the owners of the Maxwell and
IPALCO to build a safe, aesthetically pleasing sheath around the
substation. Any initial costs
incurred would be recouped in improved property residential values due to the
superior view, and IPALCO may enjoy reduced maintenance costs, since the
substation would no longer be directly exposed to the elements. The only other alternative is for them
to higher a PR guru far more gifted than the writer of this blog.

About Me

This blog concerns itself with the foundation of American dirt, regardless of where I claim to “live” at that moment. It is the playing field and landscape upon which all living participants tend to their own aspirations, leaving non-indigenous built forms which my aging digital camera hopes to capture.